The Ealing Beaver Project has been featured in a new peer-reviewed academic article: “Beavers in paradise: Prefiguring London’s urban wilds”, published in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space by Dr Jonathon Turnbull, Dr Tom Fry, and Professor Jamie Lorimer. The paper examines the Ealing Beaver Project as a pioneering example of urban rewilding in London.
The authors used a mixed-methods approach for their paper, including multispecies observations at Paradise Fields, interviews, oral histories, and archival research, to understand the complex urban wildlife experiment that is the Ealing Beaver Project.
Through their experience at Paradise Fields, the authors suggest that the Ealing Beaver Project is an example of urban nature management as “municipal wildness”, where access to nature is treated as a universal public good. The project sets an example of what life could be like when we coexist with nature — in this case, with beavers.
The authors use the Ealing Beaver Project as an example of a new kind of social experiment that they describe as “prefigurative urban ecological politics”. They define this as programmes that reimagine our urban socio-ecological relationships and create spaces where people can experience this reimagined future for themselves.
The authors are complimentary of the Ealing Beaver Project throughout the paper, concluding:
If you are interested in reading more about how the Ealing Beaver Project exemplifies this new social model for urban wildlife coexistence, give the paper a read.